Standards

As you can probably guess from my lesson last week, using digital texts to read and write is extremely important to me. The idea of encouraging communication across generation and across culture through our writing is now at the tips of our fingertips for most of us. However, I am reminded of a quote from the first chapter of Hawley Turner and Hicks that read: “Crafting arguments in a digital world could be one of our greatest opportunities to improve dialogue across cultures and continents or it could contribute to creating or continuing bitter divides” (pg. 7) I won’t even go into how this quote could be applied to all of my distant relatives on Facebook who plan on posting any opinion they have ever had on my wall. I just wanna breaifly focus on the first half of the quote based on the standards we read about and chapters 2 and 3 of Hawley Turner and Hicks. 

The only standards I have really been working with over the past year of my time in Education classes have been the middle school standards for sixth and seventh grade so it was really interesting to look at the high school CCSS. I had no idea that one of the CCSS (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.6) involved actually publishing writing onto some sort of digital world. Thinking back to the first part of my previous quote, I can’t help but think about the social effect that this sort of standard brings on students. Most of them, if not all, will have some sort of social media that has the ability to be commented on and discussed with other classmates and maybe others across the world. So, actually creating assignments that encourage students to post their thoughts and opinions to be backed up by facts through hyperlinks and multiple news sources.

Also, the NCTE standards actually did seem like they were more inclined to believing what I believe about the English curriculum. One standard that actually surprised me was: “Students whose first language is not English make use of their first language to develop competency in the English language arts and to develop understanding of content across the curriculum.” I know that during the first few weeks of classes we had begun talking about stuff like this, like actually incorporating first languages into students reading and writing. It had me thinking about how we define literacy across content areas. I was thinking mostly about how we can make sure that literacy across contents could include a standard like this outside of just ELA.